One might expect that only historians would care to revisit the 1948 war that created Israel. And yet the debate about what constitutes truth and myth from that period still provokes raw emotions. Much rests on how those events are reconstructed, not least because the shock waves have yet to subside.

Israelis fear, and Palestinians crave, a clearer picture of the past because it would powerfully illuminate the present. It might also influence the international community’s proposed solutions for the conflict. That is why the unearthing of an Israeli soldier’s letter from 1948 detailing what was probably the war’s worst massacre – one long buried by Israel – is of more than historical significance.

It comes as Moshe Yaalon, the defense minister, this week accused Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation that exposes military abuses, of “treason” for collecting evidence from the army’s current whistle-blowers. Western understandings of the 1948 war – what Palestinians term their Nakba, or catastrophe – are dominated by an enduring Israeli narrative.

Israel’s army, it is said, abided by a strict moral code. Palestinians left not because of Israel’s actions but on the orders of Arab leaders.

In this rendering, the Palestinians’ mass dispossession was the fault of the Arab world – and a solution for the millions of today’s refugees lies with their host countries.

For decades Israel’s chief concession to the truth was an admission that a massacre took place just outside Jerusalem, at Deir Yassin. Israel claimed the atrocity was the exception that proved the rule: a rogue militia killed more than 100 villagers, violating Israel’s ethical codes in the chaotic weeks before statehood was declared.

Palestinians have always known of dozens of other large massacres of civilians from 1948 carried out by the Israeli army. The barbarity, they say, was intended to terrorize the native population into flight.

This account puts responsibility on Israel for taking the refugees back. But history is written by the victor. In recent decades a few brave Israeli scholars have chipped away at the official facade. In the late 1990s a Haifa University student collected testimonies from former soldiers confirming that over 200 Palestinians had been massacred at Tantura, south of Haifa.

After the findings were made public, he was pilloried and stripped of his degree.

A decade ago, the historian Ilan Pappe wrote a groundbreaking book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, arguing that massacres like the one at Tantura were exploited to drive out Palestinians. He and others noted the suggestive titles of military operations such as “Broom” and soldiers’ orders to “clean” areas. Pappe now lives in academic exile in the UK.

The biggest obstacle to shifting Israeli and western perceptions of 1948 has been the lack of a clear paper trail connecting the political leadership to the massacres.

Israel locked away bundles of documentation precisely not to jeopardize the official narrative. But things are changing slowly. Last year a key deception was punctured: that Israel urged many of the war’s 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return.

In a letter to Haifa’s leaders shortly after the city’s Palestinians were expelled, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, demanded that any return be barred.

Now another letter, located by Israeli historian Yair Auron and published last week for the first time in English by the Haaretz newspaper, trashes the idea of an ethical Israel army. Written by Shabtai Kaplan, a soldier and journalist, the letter confirms long-held suspicions of a massacre – one that dwarfs Deir Yassin – at Dawaymeh, near Hebron.

Soldiers executed hundreds of men, women and children who offered no resistance. The massacre, near the end of the war, was carried out by elite troops under the command of Yitzhak Sadeh. He developed the Israeli army’s famous doctrine of “purity of arms”. Kaplan argues that the Dawaymeh massacre was part of “a system of expulsion and destruction”, with a clear goal: “The fewer Arabs who remain, the better.”

Kaplan’s letter was consigned to the vaults, as were so many other documents from 1948 that officials considered too damaging.

Nearly seven decades later, in an age of 24-hour news and social media, Israel is still desperately trying to conceal its darkest episodes by bullying the army’s current whistle-blowers.

Last week Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched an investigation into Breaking the Silence.

On Sunday Netanyau called the collection of soldiers’ testimonies “intolerable”, indicating that he may try to ban the group.

It is hard not to see parallels between the cover-ups of 1948 and those of today. Breaking the Silence’s disclosures, especially those relating to Israel’s series of attacks on Gaza, each of which has left hundreds of civilians dead, similarly give the lie to the army’s continuing claims of ethical behavior.

In his 1948 letter, Kaplan observed of the failure by the political leadership to hold anyone to account for the massacres: “Inaction is in itself encouragement.” Israel’s politicians hoped then that the Palestinians could be quickly terrorized from their lands. Decades later, the atrocities continue – and to the same end. But Israel must face facts: the days when such systematic brutality could be kept under wraps are now over.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Unlike the political elite and Zionist activists, the Western public had not known or cared much about the Zionist project in Palestine before the establishment of Israel.

Only after the birth of Israel, devout Christians and many Zionist Jews and secular intellectuals activated the call for sympathy, with the European Jews, to have a secured national home -- not in Europe where they had been ill-treated -- but in distant Palestine, and ignored the immorality and injustice of colonizing it.

They knew that Palestine was populated by a community which had nothing to do with the Jews' suffering in Europe, but perpetuated the Zionists big lie of “land without people for people without land” to reshape world opinion

in support of Israel. Instead of describing the establishment of Israel as European colonization of a country, and the ethnic cleansing of a nation, they focused on the “plight of Jews” in Europe.

The best-selling novel in America since “Gone with the Wind,” is Leon Uris’ 1958 blockbuster, “Exodus”. It was a story of two lovers, an American nurse and an Israeli ‘freedom fighter’ obsessed with rescuing European Jews who had survived the Holocaust. The novel was written by a Jewish American Zionist with a serious intent to reshape public opinion through Zionist propaganda about the birth of Israel. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, described the novel: “As a literary work, it isn’t much. But, as a piece of propaganda, it is the greatest thing ever written about Israel.” It became a major motion picture; more than seven million copies of the book were sold in the US; it was translated into scores of languages read by millions in numerous other countries; and, for many months, it reached New York Times best seller list. The book was secretly translated by Jewish dissidents from the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of copies were distributed, and, according to Zionist activist Leah Pliner, “the Samizdat version of Exodus became a source of inspiration among Russian Jews.”

“Exodus” was presented as a story of “heroism, sacrifice and redemption” that framed the story of Israel’s birth as a just and necessary accomplishment. The story of Israel resonates with the religious belief of devout Christians who constitute the Torah as part of their Christian scripture. In their minds, the distinction between Zionism and Judaism is rarely recognized. Supporters of Israel never cared to learn that Israel was born of the convictions of two men, Britain’s foreign minister Arthur J. Balfour, during World War I, and US President Harry S. Truman, when Nazi Germany surrendered in World War II. Balfour issued the Belfour Declaration in 1917, pledging the British government to foster “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After the World War II, Truman deemed the plight of Jews in Europe a matter of the “highest humanitarian importance”, and pressured the British to implement the declaration and not limit European Jews' immigration to Palestine.

Historians Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh wrote, in their 2009 book, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, that Truman had interest in Palestine due to his deep religious belief since his childhood: “He had read the Bible a dozen times before he was fifteen.” Even if he was not influenced by his religious belief, Truman was a politician, no different from today’s US politicians, and there were even more activist Jews in the US than in Great Britain. The racially motivated stereotypes of the Arab and Muslim worlds were invented by Western colonialists and, propagated by their media, served as implicit support for the Zionists' colonial ambitions in Palestine. And, at the same time, there were no impartial historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappѐ, or Arab intellectuals in the mould of Edward Said or Salman Abu- Sitta or Ramzy Baroud to tell the real story about colonizing Palestine.

As more archival material became available, the crimes and the expulsion of Palestinians, as a matter of historical fact, have been confirmed. An estimated 750,000 Palestinians had fled Palestine or been expelled from their homes by the Jewish military, and tens of massacres were committed. More than ninety percent of the inhabitants of Haifa, Tibrias, Beit She’an, Jafa, and Acre cities had vanished. “531 villages had been destroyed, 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants” and thousands of civilians were massacred, according to Ilan Pappѐ's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine". Roughly 15 percent of Palestinians remained behind and became Israeli citizens, and all lost their property to expropriation. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 conferred the refugees’ right of return, but Ben-Gurion and all successive Israeli governments never had any intention of implementing it or, even, accepting the return of one single refugee to her/his home in Israel.

Israeli political leaders, the Zionist and the non-Zionist, the secular and the religious, the left-wing liberals and the right-wing conservatives all have one thing in common: They all have been indoctrinated with the notion that because a person is Jewish, a “special people with inherited noble blood!,” they are entitled to take Palestinian land. If there is difference, it is in how far each is willing to go to steal the land and abuse the natives. Some rabbis wrote that “it is no sin to kill the Palestinians.”

Even the so-called liberal political Israeli leaders, like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, committed some of the worst acts of atrocities against civilian Palestinians, in the process of creating the State of Israel. Yitzhak Rabin, the future prime minister of Israel, the so called “most liberal’ Israeli politician and the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace prize, led the military unit that ethincally cleansed two prosperous and peaceful towns of their civilian Palestinians, inflicting great suffering upon the evicted men, women and children.

Rabin described his role in the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from the towns of Lod and Ramle, when he was the commander of the Harel Brigade. He wrote in his memoir: “While the fighting was still in progress, we had to grapple with a problem: the fate of the civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000. [Yigal] Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot toward Bet Horon road. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the fifteen miles to the point where they met up with the [Arab] Legion.”

The 1967 war that demolished pan-Arabism left Israel in full control of historical Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, and changed the image of the conflict, in the West, from one pitting the Arab world against tiny Israel to one pitting mighty Israel with its formidable military strength against the pitiful Palestinians. The Israel that used to accuse its enemies of denying the Jews a state, is now denying that same right to another people, the Palestinians.

A UN investigatory commission chaired by the Jewish jurist, Richard Goldstone, accused Israel of “crimes against humanity” during the three-week war on Gaza in 2009. Editor's note: See video. (WARNING -- Content is extremely graphic in nature.)And, many human rights organizations and activists accused Israel of crimes against the Palestinians in the 2012 and 2014 wars on the people of Gaza, and for occupying, colonizing and enforcing an apartheid regime in the West Bank. Things came full circle after more than seventy years of establishing the permanent international court and “crimes against humanity” category in 1945, for the Nuremberg trials of thirteen surviving Nazi defendants, for the mass murder of Jews and others. Leaders of Israel who like to describe their state as “the Jewish State” stood accused of “crimes against humanity” during their war against the Palestinian refugees. The Israeli State that was widely admired by the West, for its resolution to “never again” allow Jews to be targeted, is now being denounced for targeting the Palestinians.

Many international bodies, including some in Europe and the US, joined the denunciation of Israel. They joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which calls for the economic and cultural isolation of Israel until it complies with international law on Palestinian rights. British teacher unions have called for the academic boycott of Israel; the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Pension and Health Benefits announced its decision to divest from five Israeli banks it said failed to meet its 2015 investment criteria based on human rights; Norwegian supermarkets boycotted Israeli goods that are produced in West Bank settlements; and, former US President, Jimmy Carter has published a book accusing Israel of practicing apartheid.

Seventy years after 1947-48 “Nakba”, the Palestinians have won a moral victory. Crimes against them are finally called “crimes” !

A rarely told story of the 1948 war that founded Israel concerns Nazareth’s survival. It is the only Palestinian city in what is today Israel that was not ethnically cleansed during the year-long fighting. Other cities, such as Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, Haifa and Acre, now have small Palestinian populations that mostly live in ghetto-like conditions in what have become Jewish cities. Still others, like Tiberias and Safad, have no Palestinians left in them at all.

Nazareth was not only an anomaly; it was a mistake. It was supposed to be cleared of its Palestinian population, just like those other Palestinian cities now in Israel. Much to Israel’s regret, it has become an unofficial capital for Israel’s 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the Israeli population.

The reason for Nazareth’s survival are the actions of one individual. Ben Dunkelman, a Canadian Jew who was the commander of the Israeli army’s Seventh Armoured Brigade, disobeyed orders to expel Nazareth’s residents.

Dunkelman’s role has been largely obscured in the historical record – and for good reason. Israel would prefer that observers make an unjustified assumption: that “Christian” Nazareth survived, unlike other Palestinian cities, because its leaders were less militant or because they preferred to surrender. Dunkelman’s story proves that was not the case.

It is therefore a welcome development that a major Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, has revisited Dunkelman’s role in Nazareth, even if its reporter, Mitch Potter, has contributed in his own way to the mythologising of Dunkelman in an article headlined: “The Toronto man who saved Nazareth”.

Excised memories

It is worth bearing in mind, when we consider the attacks on Palestinian cities in 1948, how sensitive these matters were for Israel. Both Dunkelman and another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, who would later become a prime minister, wrote memoirs that included their experiences of the 1948 war.

Under pressure from the Israeli military authorities, both excised from their accounts the sections they had written dealing with the attacks on the Palestinian cities they were responsible for attacking. That was because those accounts were the proof, long denied by Israel and its supporters, that the Israeli leadership had intended and carried out the ethnic cleansing of most of the Palestinian population during 1948.

Some 750,000 Palestinians – out of 900,000 living inside the borders of what was to become the new Jewish state – were forced out and refused the right to return. In fact, the expulsion rate was far higher than the ostensible 80 per cent figure. Under pressure from the Vatican, Israel allowed many Christian refugees back; it did a land swap with Jordan in 1949 that brought more than 30,000 Palestinians into the new state; and many Palestinian refugees managed to sneak back to surviving communities like Nazareth and blend in with the local population in preparation for what they hoped would be their return to their villages.

Rabin led the attack on the Palestinian cities of Lydd and Ramleh, near Tel Aviv and today the mostly Jewish cities of Lod and Ramla. According to the missing section of his autobiography, later publicised in the New York Times, Rabin asked David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, what to do with the 50,000 inhabitants of Lydd and Ramleh. Rabin recounted: “Ben Gurion waved his hand in a gesture that said: ‘Drive them out!’” Rabin did exactly that, after a terrible massacre of hundreds of residents who were sheltering in a local mosque.

Ben Gurion, as the Israeli historian of the period Ilan Pappe has noted in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, was careful not to leave a paper trail showing that he had ordered the expulsion of Palestinians. Instead, Israel would promote the myth that the Palestinian population had been ordered by neighbouring Arab leaders to flee.

Relieved of command

We do not know if Dunkelman had a similar meeting with Ben Gurion. What we do know, and the Star’s account confirms, is that it had been made clear to Dunkelman that he was supposed to expel the inhabitants of Nazareth. Dunkelman disobeyed, and allowed the city to surrender. He was relieved of his command in Nazareth a day later.

The Star reports on a page referring to the attack on Nazareth that was removed from Dunkelman’s 1976 memoir, Dual Allegiance. We know about it only because his ghostwriter, the late Israeli journalist Peretz Kidron, tried to interest the New York Times in Dunkelman’s story, as a counterpart to Rabin’s.

The Times published the Rabin story but ignored Dunkelman’s.

Interestingly, Dunkelman kept the account of his role in the Nazareth attack so quiet that, according to their quotes in the Star, neither his son nor his publisher at Macmillan knew about it.

Dunkelman writes that he was “shocked and horrified” at the order to depopulate Nazareth. He told his superior, Haim Laskov: “I would do nothing of the sort.” He demanded that his replacement give his “word of honour” that the inhabitants would be allowed to stay, and concludes: “It seems that my disobedience did have some effect … It seems to have given the high command time for second thoughts, which led them to the conclusion that it would indeed be wrong to expel. There was never any more talk of the evacuation plan, and the city’s Arab citizens have lived there ever since.”

‘Swallowing’ Nazareth

In fact, we know what those “second thoughts” were. Stripped of a pretext to justify expulsions from Nazareth in the supposed “heat of battle”, Ben Gurion came up with Plan B (or maybe it was Plan E, given that the ethnic cleansing was inspired by Plan Dalet, or D in Hebrew).

In the wake of the 1948 war, during a near two-decade period of military government imposed on Israel’s new Palestinian minority, Ben Gurion decided to establish Nazareth Ilit (Upper Nazareth) almost on top of Nazareth. It was the flagship of his “Judaisation of the Galilee” campaign. Ben Gurion was aghast not only that Nazareth had survived, but that it had doubled in size as thousands of refugees from surrounding villages fled to it seeking sanctuary.

According to Israeli state archives, Michael Michael, the military governor for Nazareth in this period, stated that the goal of Nazareth Ilit was to “swallow up” Nazareth. In short, Israel hoped retrospectively to destroy Nazareth as a Palestinian city, transforming it into another Lydd. The Jewish city of Nazareth Ilit would become the main city, with Nazareth its own shadow ghetto. Despite Israel’s best efforts, it largely failed in this goal, not least because it struggled to attract Israeli Jews to live next to a large Palestinian population .

Why was it so important for the Israeli leadership to destroy Nazareth? Because they feared that a Palestinian city – with its intellectuals, political activists, and advanced education system under the control of international Christian institutions – might encourage the emergence of an effective resistance, one that would be able to mount opposition to a state privileging Jews. Such a political and cultural capital might articulate to the outside world exactly what Israel was up to in Judaising places with large Palestinian populations like the Galilee.

Mortar barrages

The Toronto Star’s starry-eyed account of Dunkelman includes the following observation: “He won no medals for refusing to molest civilians [in Nazareth], nor any credit from his Israeli superiors.” He is painted as a man who stuck close to the rules of war and avoided hurting civilians wherever possible in a series of “almost bloodless” attacks.

But in fact, as the Star notes in passing, Dunkelman’s chief military talent was for making innovative use of “concentrated mortar barrages”, a skill he learnt during the Second World War. In other words, he was an expert at firing large numbers of imprecise shells into populated areas, inevitably killing and wounding civilians.

Two Canadians have published posts making important criticisms of the Star’s account.

Peter Larson, chair of Canada’s National Education Committee on Israel-Palestine, points out that the operation in July 1948 led by Dunkelman was an attack on communities like Nazareth that were supposed to be firmly part of an Arab state under the terms of the United Nations Partition Plan, set out nine months earlier. As Larson writes, “Nazareth was forcibly incorporated into the new State of Israel contrary to the UN plan and despite the wishes of its residents.”

Protection for Christians

There is archival evidence to suggest that Dunkelman believed Christian Palestinians needed protecting, a view he did not extend to Muslim Palestinians.

Israeli historian Benny Morris notes a cable from Dunkelman as his troops marched through the Galilee in November 1948: “I protest against the eviction of Christians from the village of Rama and its environs. We saw Christians at Rama in the fields thirsty for water and suffering from robbery. Other brigades expelled Christians from villages that did not resist and surrendered to our forces. I suggest that you issue an order to return the Christians to their villages.”

Morris mentions that under the influence of Dunkelman, among others, the Israeli army’s guidelines on the expulsion of Christian Palestinians changed over time.

In contrast to his decision to protect Nazareth and Christians, Dunkelman and his soldiers were ruthless in driving out Palestinians from many of the more than 500 Palestinian communities razed by Israel in 1948 and afterwards.

War crimes

In Saffuriya, a large Muslim village a few kilometres from Nazareth that was attacked by the Seventh Brigade a day earlier, barrel bombs were dropped on the village as the residents were at home breaking that day’s Ramadan fast. All of Saffuriya’s inhabitants were driven out, and their homes destroyed. Today it is an exclusively Jewish farming community called Tzipori.

Without a doubt, Dunkelman directly participated in the mass expulsion of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians from their homes – a war crime by the laws of war that had recently emerged in the wake of the Second World War. He also admitted in his memoir that he allowed his troops to loot Palestinian property, another war crime.

But, while he does not refer to them in Dual Allegiance, Dunkelman is also implicated in some of the more notorious Israeli massacres of Palestinians in 1948.

In the worst case, in the village of Safsaf, north of Safad, notes Canadian journalist Dan Freeman-Moloy, Dunkelman had command responsibility as he led Operation Hiram in late October 1948. His troops’ behaviour in Safsaf and elsewhere is made clear in documents in Israel’s military archives uncovered by Morris for his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

Drawing on a declassified briefing from November 1948 by Israel Galili, Ben Gurion’s number two in the defence ministry, Morris writes of the actions of Dunkelman’s troops:

“At Saliha it appears that troops blew up a house, possibly the village mosque, killing 60-94 persons who had been crowded into it. In Safsaf, troops shot and then dumped into a well 50-70 villagers and POWs [prisoners of war]. In Jish, the troops apparently murdered about 10 Moroccan POWs (who had served with the Syrian Army) and a number of civilians, including, apparently, four Maronite Christians, and a woman and her baby.”

Morris concluded: “These atrocities, mostly committed against Muslims, no doubt precipitated the flight of communities on the path of the IDF advance. … What happened at Safsaf and Jish no doubt reached the villagers of Ras al Ahmar, ‘Alma, Deishum and al Malikiya hours before the Seventh Brigade’s columns. These villages, apart from ‘Alma, seem to have been completely or largely empty when the IDF arrived.”

Dunkelman can no doubt take credit for Nazareth’s survival. But a full and proper historical accounting is still needed of the war crimes committed not only by Dunkelman but by those he answered to.